THE GARDEN was a mess but that was one of the reasons Jean and David had purchased the old house, they both loved the idea of working on it.
They had made many plans, sitting with cups of instant coffee on the wide veranda with the splintery wood warm against their bare legs. They would dig and prune and plant within the existing layout so the restored house would stand comfortable and at peace.
There was no hurry. The old place was so serene that they were content to work slowly, gaining pleasure from long pauses to stand and listen or to walk in and out of the house for the enjoyment of the kaleidoscope colours thrown onto the floor from the glass panels in the front door, or to fill their lungs with the sweetness of as yet undiscovered Daphne or the faint mauve breath of wisteria.
After a number of Saturdays it was all done save a largish patch in the far corner neither had tackled.
There had been sound reasons — it rained one weekend, the next Jean had a headache, and so on while the little wilderness stood in silent reproach — but the truth was that both had left it till last and were even now oddly reluctant to make a start. It was so great a tangle of mallows (grey and dusty, not producing flowers or the little sweet buds they used to chew as children) and roses which had been a riot of colour over the rest of the garden seemed here to be lifeless. There was an old shed (hen coop or maybe kennel) which had bleached not to warm silver but dull grey, and a grey gaunt magnolia tree.
So the corner stayed while they fussed around already completed projects but when Jean's mother wrote that she was coming to visit they could put it off no longer and devoted a hopeful Saturday.
It took almost an effort to make the first cut at a rose, surely the secateurs were not that blunt, and when they took a saw to the tree it groaned and shuddered. They had been intending to cut it out but there was one small bud and a hint of green in the branch they attacked. They pruned heavily instead but it creaked and shook alarmingly.
There were several hours work before they even got near the old shed and as they worked there was an odd sensation —a strange feeling of revulsion mixed with a hint of sweetness. As they tidied up the tree they had found that most of the far side was scorched as if struck by lightning and the shed which proved to be a hen coop was likewise burnt down one side. The wire hung in cobwebby skeins and the door was lopsided on leather hinges. When they glanced up the sun still shone brightly and there was no cloud to account for the chill they both felt as they stooped to lift a wire shutter.
Yet still that lingering impression of something beautiful. Inside the coop the straw was rank and mouldy, nest boxes were cobwebbed four posters grey as time. Horribly, in each box sat a hen, mummified, and sitting for ever on petrified eggs. Again that faint sensation, that enigma, for in one corner a newly hatched chick stood between halves of the shell that should have been its catafalque. As Jean made an astonished gesture towards the chick there was a mere impression of snatching,
a terrified peeping which died abruptly — and the chick was no more than a thought.
They backed hurriedly out, dragging in sight and breath to reassure themselves that house and garden still were there. No Solomon sat turning his magic ring at the whim of an imperious butterfly, the sun still shone and the buzz saws of a multitude of insects were heavy on the air.
The peace seemed undisturbed but when Jean went to make coffee the house seemed to have closed up on itself and for the first time she disturbed fifty years of ghosts.
They went back to the garden, by unspoken agreement avoiding the hen coop but as they worked David kept glancing round. "Can't you hear it?" he asked at length.
"Hear what?"
"I keep hearing someone calling, asking to be let out."
"Kids playing next door perhaps."
"No, it is here —" he stood erect, "it is calling from the coop, wonder if a kiddie wandered in while we were up at the house, maybe the door has blown shut."
Jean shuddered. "Oh poor little "scrap, in there with those dead chooks."
But the coop was exactly as they had left it although the door creaked to and fro ceaselessly yet there was not a breath of wind.
" But I swear it is coming from here," David insisted," no, it is not a voice, it’s more like a wish I can hear. Someone is willing me to let them out."
Jean stared at him, and then, she too caught something which was more frightening for its very indefiniteness, a pleading overlaid by insistence. It became gradually sorted out in her mind to two voices —one wheedling, impelling, urging in a way that was at once evil and attractive and the other crying for release or help.
Step by reluctant step they were drawn to search. Now hot now cold like a child's game but with a terrifying difference. The back wall of the coop seemed to stretch into eternity as they sought, held to a radar course by the voices.
Across the far corner lay a beam which had brought the whole of the back wall down. Here the voices clamoured frantically, forcing them to their knees to scrabble at the beam —the horror if a child should be trapped here —but once more the voices sorted themselves in their subconscious, one evil and seductive, one benign.
The voices released David long enough for him to fetch a bar from outside, now they strained at it while the voices fell over each other like malign puppies.
The beam turned over with a crash while Jean screamed, pointing at David's foot and shrinking back. Beneath the beam lay a blue-black multi legged shape, crushed and flattened to a reverse U by the beam. As they watched ‘it gradually restored itself, pulsing and inflating to nearly the size of a cat. Huge, spider-like but no spider they had ever seen. Clambering from the trench made by the beam it stretched and shrank, stretched and shrank, and the voices in their mind became strident and urgent.
Revulsion. David struck out with the bar, the creature flattened momentarily and then came on. Again he struck, again it paused and then came on, bigger now. Jean picked up a broken tile and threw it.
The creature stopped and shuddered. She had missed the head, but two of the oddly fragile legs had been severed and before their eyes it deflated to the size of a mouse and dragged itself away, disappearing through a gap in the wall.
They were astounded to find themselves standing there, completely unable to recall the reason for fear. The hen coop was laughably mundane —the mummified hens had long since fallen into dust —and the magnolia outside was breaking into glorious blossom. The hen coop would make a good garden shed after repairs, they fancied a swing in the magnolia, there was another garden tap, and the straw would make good mulch.
When they finished lifting the beam, just part of the clearing job now, Jean found a rather pretty plant which had started to grow over part of it. It was a fern with particularly delicate fronds and she found a ceramic pot for it.
Altogether, a highly satisfactory day in the garden.
The little plant did marvellously, soon outgrowing its first pot and putting out a dainty tracery of hanging greenery.
One day the budgie disappeared, each blamed the other for carelessness in latching the cage, and then they found a pathetic bundle of feathers under the macramé plant hanger and blamed the cat. Jokingly, they said the plant must keep insects away for there were never any flies on the hanger,
but one day they found the wings of a monarch butterfly on the floor and somehow they didn't feel like joking. Besides, it could easily start them off arguing, something they were doing more and more — Silly squabbles. The garden was lovely but the house no longer seemed quaint, its irregularities of level room to room were no longer amusing, they no longer chuckled when they bumped heads in the minute scullery, and the once airy kitchen was downright draughty and inconvenient.
Still the plant grew and they had to re-pot it.
They began occasionally to get an echo of the voices, often, they heard one voice each and so argued even more senselessly. One day the cat disappeared. Still they tended the lovely plant, stopping often to contemplate its beauty. It became an obsession, Jean was hypnotised by the gentle waving of the fronds that dropped in lace medallions from the pot, even though she found that her hands were raised in painful welts after watering it. She thought idly that she must be allergic to something?
It didn't seem worth bothering about.
She ignored other signs —a bumblebee must have flown out, a dog must have crept in and stolen the leg of mutton left to thaw, and after all fantails did fly very fast and one couldn’t always be sure where they had gone.
But... One day a friend brought her small dog to visit and when it was time to go the animal could not be found. They thought he must have run on home, but when her friend had gone Jean found his red leather collar on the floor.
Perhaps it was too loose and he had pulled his head out. Her sister left her toddler with Jean for the day. The child was fascinated by the waving plant, and as for the plant —you could have sworn it purred. The child held out fat hands and the plant stretched with self-satisfied sensuality and insinuated a coil round the little wrist.
Jean's scream brought David in from his study. Frozen with horror they watched the child, at first chuckling and then screaming, drawn slowly towards the plant.
It was a Moloch of a plant. The voices began again. They remembered fear now, were paralysed by it. The voices rang louder and louder, they could not stretch one finger to help the baby.
More fronds had reached out when inch by painful inch across the floor came the creature they had struck at in the hen coop. And as it came it sang. The voice was very weak, the creature was still very small and lacked two legs. The singing plant trembled but did not let go of the baby.
The battle crackled through their minds, now the humming from the spider-creature was stronger and the plant snarled and released the child, stretching out its tentacles to the spider.
Gone was the last vestige of beauty, only the malice was left. Jean snatched up the baby and fled to the furthest corner of the room, unable to take her eyes from the valiant little cripple that continued to sing. The song became vibrant, it shimmered through the beauteously. It rose and fell, rose and fell as the plant prevailed. A tentacle had reached the spider-creature and was drawing it, still singing in their minds, towards it.
The song became weaker, faltered, the plant grew even larger and suddenly David tore himself free of the spell and ran to the stereo. Something in the timbre of the song of the creature reminded him of one of their records, Ripping sleeve and dustcover from a record he selected a track he thought most like and put the stylus well in so there was no delay.
'The Reichardt Rondo’ filled the room, the ethereal hypnotic Glass Harmonica, crystal clear, humming, spinning strength and victory through the fingers of Bruno Hoffmann. The wine glasses leaped and sparkled, and the warmth of the contrasting string quartet and the deep throb of the double bass filled the room with love.
The humans and the little outworlder sang with joy and the plant lay dead.
Then they gazed deeply into the velvet blackness where eyes would have been in an earthly creature, knowing without words that he had forgiven their panic-stricken actions in the hen coop, understood that even on other worlds other intelligences were misled by appearances. Knowing that he loved them (and they him) that his work was done, that he must return to timeless space, and leave them in their serene garden.